Community quality of life indicators best cases VII

Community Quality-of-Life and Well-Being

Meg Holden
Rhonda Phillips
Chantal Stevens Editors

Community
Quality-of-Life
Indicators: Best
Cases VII


Community Quality-of-Life and Well-Being
Series editor
Rhonda Phillips, Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN, USA


The Community Quality of Life and Well-being book series is a collection of
volumes related to community level research, providing community planners and
quality of life researchers involved in community and regional well-being
innovative research and application. Formerly entitled, Community Quality of
Life Indicators: Best Practices, the series reflects a broad scope of well-being. Next
to best practices of community quality-of-life indicators projects the series
welcomes a variety of research and practice topics as related to overall community
well-being and quality of life dimensions, whether relating to policy, application,
research, and/or practice. Research on issues such as societal happiness, quality of
life domains in the policy construct, measuring and gauging progress, dimensions
of planning and community development, and related topics are anticipated. This
series is published by Springer in partnership with the International Society for
Quality-of-Life Studies, a global society with the purpose of promoting and
encouraging research and collaboration in quality of life and well-being theory and

applications.

More information about this series at />

Meg Holden Rhonda Phillips
Chantal Stevens
•

Editors

Community Quality-of-Life
Indicators: Best Cases VII

123


Editors
Meg Holden
Urban Studies Program
Simon Fraser University
Vancouver, BC
Canada

Chantal Stevens
King County Auditor’s Office
Seattle
USA

Rhonda Phillips
Honors College

Purdue University
West Lafayette, IN
USA

ISSN 2520-1093
ISSN 2520-1107 (electronic)
Community Quality-of-Life and Well-Being
ISBN 978-3-319-54617-9
ISBN 978-3-319-54618-6 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-54618-6
Library of Congress Control Number: 2017934215
© Springer International Publishing AG 2017
This work is subject to copyright. All rights are reserved by the Publisher, whether the whole or part
of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations,
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The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this
publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from
the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use.
The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this
book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the
authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or
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jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.
Printed on acid-free paper
This Springer imprint is published by Springer Nature
The registered company is Springer International Publishing AG
The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Contents

1

The History, Status and Future of the Community Indicators
Movement . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Lyle Wray, Chantal Stevens and Meg Holden

Part I
2

3

4

5

6

1

Organizing Concepts and Collaboration in Community
Indicators

The Role of Subjective Well-Being as an Organizing Concept
for Community Indicators . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Christopher Barrington-Leigh

19

Community Indicators and the Collective Goods Criterion
for Impact . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Frank Ridzi

35

Collaboration to Promote Use of Community Indicators:
Communication Is Key . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Craig Helmstetter, Paul Mattessich, Ruth Hamberg
and Nancy Hartzler

53

Aligning Local and Regional Data to Achieve a More Inclusive
Economy: A Northeast Ohio Model . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Emily Garr Pacetti

69

Getting to Groundbreaking, but not Build Out: From Formation
to Failure in a Regional Housing Indicators Collaborative . . . . . . .
Meg Holden

87

v


vi

Contents

Part II

Community Indicators Identifying Different Types of
Disadvantage

7

Environmental Justice in Australia: Measuring the Relationship
Between Industrial Odour Exposure and Community
Disadvantage . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 113
Lucy Dubrelle Gunn, Billy Greenham, Melanie Davern,
Suzanne Mavoa, Elizabeth Jean Taylor and Mark Bannister

8

Addressing Disparities and Improving the System of Care
for Veterans Through the Community Assessment Process . . . . . . . 135
Samantha Green and Melanie Espino

9

Economic Issues for Women in Texas . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 149
Jennifer Lee and Frances Deviney

10 Comprehensive Sustainability Indicators: The Houston
Sustainability Indicators Program . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 167
Lester O. King

About the Editors

Meg Holden (Ph.D., New School for Social Research)
is a social scientist whose research investigates the
promises and results of sustainability planning in cities
around the world. She is an Associate Professor of
urban studies and geography at Simon Fraser
University in Vancouver, Canada. Meg served as a
board member of the Community Indicators
Consortium from 2011 to 2016 and she currently serves
as editorial board member of the journal Applied
Research in Quality of Life as well as the Springer book
series on Community Quality of Life and Wellbeing.
Meg is the author of Pragmatic Justifications for the
Sustainable City: Acting in the common place
(Routledge, 2017).
Rhonda Phillips Ph.D., FACIP, has research and
outreach efforts that focus on the quality of life and
well-being related to community and economic development. At Purdue University, she serves as inaugural
Dean of the Honors College and Professor in the
Agricultural Economics Department. She is author or
editor of over 20 books, including Sustainable
Communities: Creating a Durable Local Economy, and
Introduction to Community Development. Formerly a
Senior Sustainability Scientist with the Wrigley Global
Institute of Sustainability, Rhonda also served as
Director and Professor in the School of Community
Resources and Development at Arizona State

University. She is a member of the College of Fellows

vii


viii

About the Editors

of the American Institute of Certified Planners, and
immediate past president of the International Society
for Quality-of-Life Studies.
Chantal Stevens is the Executive Director of the
Community Indicators Consortium, an open learning
network and global community of practice among
persons interested or engaged in the field of indicators
development and application. Her interests and expertise in sustainability, community indicators, public
engagement and performance management were honed
over a 25-year career as the Executive Director of
Sustainable Seattle, a pioneer in the field of
community-generated indicators, and People for
Salmon, a state-wide public engagement initiative, as
well as Performance Management Analyst and
Legislative Auditor with King County, Environmental
Division Manager with the Muckleshoot Indian Tribe,
and several terms on the Issaquah Planning
Commission and many position and diverse boards or
commissions. She holds a Master’s Degree in Marine
Affairs from the University of Washington.

Chapter 1

The History, Status and Future
of the Community Indicators Movement
Lyle Wray, Chantal Stevens and Meg Holden

Abstract This introductory chapter to the volume provides an overview of the
history of community indicators, beginning with a grant provided by the Russell
Sage Foundation in 1910 to the Charity Organization Society (of New York) to
survey industrial conditions in Pittsburgh, and moving to present day. As a social
movement, we present community indicators efforts as being grounded in challenges and innovations within the distinct but overlapping domains of public
administration, social work and philanthropy, community development, sustainable
communities and environmental justice, happiness and wellbeing studies, and data
analytics. Each frames and pursues the task of crafting and disseminating indicators
of community conditions in a different way, resulting in a richly diverse field of
practice and theory, that the Community Indicators Consortium seeks to serve and
promote. In so doing, the Community Indicators Consortium recognizes that uniting
these diverse approaches in community indicators provides a forum in which to
pursue common themes of work, including the need to amplify the voice of disadvantaged communities, to seriously explore the increasing use of information
technology, to produce positive community change and to sustain these efforts over
time. Each chapter in this volume is also summarized here.

Á

Á

Keywords Community indicators Community indicators consortium Public
administration Wellbeing indicators Philanthropy Community development
Sustainable development Data analytics Happiness studies

Á

Á

Á

Á

Á

Á

L. Wray
Capitol Region Council of Governments, Hartford, CT, USA
C. Stevens
Community Indicators Consortium, Issaquah, WA, USA
M. Holden (&)
Simon Fraser University, Vancouver, Canada
e-mail:
© Springer International Publishing AG 2017
M. Holden et al. (eds.), Community Quality-of-Life Indicators:
Best Cases VII, Community Quality-of-Life and Well-Being,
DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-54618-6_1

1


2

1.1

L. Wray et al.

History of the Community Indicators Movement

While data and statistics have been used for centuries by governments and businesses, the origin of community indicators is associated with a grant provided by
the Russell Sage Foundation in 1910 to the Charity Organization Society of New
York to survey industrial conditions in Pittsburgh (Smith 1991, 40–41). After the
study was released in 1914, the Russell Sage Foundation provided technical advice
to many other cities to complete similar work. Partly because of this initiative, over
two thousand local surveys were taken on education, recreation, public health,
crime, and general social conditions.
In the second half of the 20th century, the evolution of the indicators field
paralleled, and sometimes triggered, the evolution of consciousness about what
constitutes quality of life in community. The 1960s and 1970s saw the rise of the
social indicators movement. In 1974, the academic journal Social Indicators
Research was founded and started publishing research results dealing with measurement of the quality of life that encompassed the whole spectrum of society at
scales ranging from the individual to international systems.
In 1985, the charitable organization JCCI in Jacksonville, Florida initiated a set
of quality-of-life indicators that tracked a variety of issues to understand progress.
With Sustainable Seattle in 1992 and others, sustainability indicators came into
existence at about the same time as sustainability became a concept in public
discourse, often associated with the work of the Brundtland Commission (the
World Commission on Environment and Development) in 1987 and affirmed by the
1992 Rio Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Along with their focus on
sustainability, this approach to indicators, in contrast with previous efforts, was
grassroots and bottom-up. As such, they established a new base for social indicators, where the community is the originator, the guardian and the audience of the
project. The community indicators movement was born.
With precedent-setting work by the Reno, Nevada-based indicators initiative

Truckee Meadows Tomorrow, modern indicator projects are leading movements in
their communities based on a commitment not merely to measure trends but to act
on trends of concern, via cross-sector collaboration. SA2020, in San Antonio,
Texas, along with many contemporary projects, took to heart the criticisms directed
at their predecessors that indicators initiatives were investing the bulk of their time
to establish strong and defensible measurement systems, leaving far too little
time for considerations of either how to publicize and generate an audience for their
work, or how to act to change undesirable trends. SA2020 now outsources data
collection and analysis to a third party. Instead of assembling data, the indicators
initiative focuses on communicating information and engaging the community in
steps toward positive change.
Building on the “Beyond GDP” approaches of the 1990s, the well-being
movement emerged explicitly in this century. Recent years have seen community


1 The History, Status and Future of Community Indicators

3

indicator projects evolve with greater focus on the importance of the individual,
happiness and well-being, within community change. This has meant a concomitant
expansion of the measures taken to include the realm of individuals’ subjective
experiences within community and the impact these experiences have on their
assessment of life in their community. The measurement frontier of community
indicators work now engages the particular challenge of identifying valid, comparable measures of happiness, mental health, and the experience of equity and
fairness.
Barrington-Leigh and Escande (2016) constructed a database of well-being and
progress indicators with the key elements being: material living standards, health,
education, governance and civic participation, social connections, relationships and
community, environment, culture, accounts of time-use, and various types of

security. This list overlaps a good deal with the earlier commissioned work of
Stiglitz et al. (2009) who proposed eight indicators for well-being and progress.

1.2

Evolution of the Community Indicators Consortium

The Community Indicators Consortium (CIC) started as an umbrella of nine
organizations producing indicators, that came together to help provide some overall
coherence, coordination, and mutual support within the burgeoning international
community indicators movement. The idea for the Consortium germinated at the
2003 International Society for Quality-of-Life Studies (ISQOLS) conference on
community indicators in Williamsburg, Virginia and led to the first CIC conference
in 2004 in Reno, Nevada on the theme “Advancing the Science and Practice of
Community Indicators.” The 2004 conference in Reno drew together an unexpectedly large group of participants, who brought their diverse perspectives, skills,
knowledge, and experience in community indicators work. The conference buzzed
with the shared passion of attendees to improve the quality of life in communities
through approaches that utilize measurable indicators of progress.
Due in part to the success of the conference and the positive interest it generated,
CIC incorporated with the goal of becoming a “learning community” and offering
resources and connections necessary to any group aiming to develop and implement
a community indicators project that is aimed at “making a difference” in community. Now in its thirteenth year, CIC is led by a 15-member board and an executive
director and counts about 300 dues-paying members.
CIC’s mission is to advance and support the development, availability and
effective use of community indicators for making measurable and sustainable
improvements in quality of community life. CIC works to fulfill its mission by
hosting an annual international conference, organizing educational and networking
events, providing on-line classes, and sharing information in a timely and
dependable way. CIC built and maintains a comprehensive online database of past

4

L. Wray et al.

and active community indicator projects all over the world (www.
communityindicators.net/projects). In addition, over the dozen years of its existence, CIC has taken on several special projects, led by the interests and opportunities identified by members. One notable project dealt with the intersection of
community indicator projects and the use of systems of performance measures in
organizations, including local governments. This work resulted in a set of guidelines for the integration of performance measures and community indicators, and
the development of a community indicator-performance measurement maturity
model which puts these guidelines to the test of practice.

1.3

What Are “Community Indicators”?

The definition of ‘community indicators’ is often in the eye of the beholder.
Breaking the term into its two component parts, it involves indicators, metrics that
represent a level or a condition and that often can be expressed as a rate or a count.
Just as importantly, it involves ‘community’, a grouping of people based on a
geographic, demographic or social criterion, such as a neighborhood, ethnicity,
income level, etc. As a social movement, community indicators groups are often
expected to function with some input or leadership from the community, acting
outside of or in parallel with formal local government, and to include a process for
reporting to the community in a format that is public and accessible to non-experts.
Community indicator projects are developed to serve as a map to guide priority
and agenda-setting for the work of multiple responsible groups in improving
community-level conditions across the full spectrum of challenges affecting a
community. The indicator format allows for progress on each measure of significance to be tracked over time and compared to conditions experienced by comparator communities. Sometimes, an additional step taken within community
indicators work is to set numeric targets for indicators, where the intent is to

motivate interventions toward achieving a community goal. Targets may be chosen
by decision-makers or the community, and can be drawn from science or policy
(e.g. acceptable levels of air pollutants established by the World Health
Organization), based on the best practices of other communities (e.g. to achieve the
same rate of persons with a family doctor as community “x”), or based on the
aspirations of the community (e.g. to be the first greenhouse gas neutral community). A city may work to decrease the ground level particulates in the air based on a
reference to scientific research that shows at what level that pollutant will impact
the health of the most vulnerable, or threaten community health generally; or it may
compare the poverty level to that of peer cities or that of the state, province or
country, with a view either to addressing inequities in conditions or to building
capacity to address poverty overall.


1 The History, Status and Future of Community Indicators

5

In addition to individual indicators or frameworks, several indices have been
proposed to summarize a portfolio of measures. When a portfolio of indicators is
needed to tell the full story of a community, indices offer an easy to understand
solution, hence the popularity of a summarizing index such as the Dow Jones
Industrial Average, for example. Interactive indices such as the Ecological
Footprint (Wackernagel and Rees 1996), the Walk Score (walkscore.org) and the
Livability Index (AARP) have captured the popular imagination because they distil
complex ecological or social-economic considerations into a single digit that allows
for manipulation and comparisons based on changes in locations or aspirations. The
Prosperity Index of the Legatum Institute ( is a
high-level index of well-being indicators. Its eight dimensions overlap in good part
with the Stiglitz et al. (2009) model for measurement of well-being: economy,
entrepreneurship and opportunity, governance, education, health, safety and security, personal freedom, and social capital.

Barrington-Leigh and Escande (2016) lament the fact that existing indices with
many components often lack transparency as to how the index is formed and thus
lack staying power as they may fail to persuade those who will not simply accept
the wisdom of the choices implicit within an index.

1.4

Framing Community Indicators Projects

Community indicators span a wide range of dimensions, levels of generality and
precision, geography and time series depth. Applicability to the community as a
whole or to specific interests and identities, and those that indicate objectively
measurable phenomena as well as those that reflect subjective perceptions all may
feature together in the indicator system. Some community indicator systems scale
their focus at the postal or zip code level, others at the level of the neighborhood or
block group, others around the landscape scale such as a watershed or a geopolitical
construct, such as a metropolitan region. Many are designed as multipurpose
data-rich tools for local understanding and community work, which can be tailored
according to different geographies, time periods, interest groups, policy areas of
focus, or other specificities.
Just as in performance measurement, it often helps to have an organizing
framework for a portfolio of indicators in a given community. Many projects
organize community priorities as “domains” and populate each domain with indicators. One of the more popular frameworks groups indicators into environment,
economy and equity. The term “triple bottom line” was first coined in 1994 and has
been used extensively not only in the community indicator field but beyond (Hindle
2012). Based on Putnam’s seminal work, the four basic types of capital—human,
social, built, and natural—provide another useful framework well adapted to
tracking well-being at the community level. Cultural, political and financial capitals

6

L. Wray et al.

were added by Flora and Flora (2004) to constitute their community capitals
framework. Other frameworks employed, particularly in the public sector, are
known as the balanced scorecard approach (Kaplan and Norton 1996), the social
return on investment (Millar 2012), and results-based accountability (Friedman
1997).

1.5

Situating Community Indicators Work

The work of designing, framing, reporting on and implementing action from a basis
of community indicators today is conducted by people from a range of different
professions. Over the history of the movement, as different groups of professionals
have recognized value in community indicators work, they have also adapted the
work involved in creating and using community indicators to suit their own professional norms and capacities. This has added to the richness of debate and
diversity in the field. Figure 1.1 presents a diagrammatic understanding of the
major professional fields currently engaged in community indicators work, from our
perspective within the Community Indicators Consortium. Each field’s different
engagement with community indicators will be discussed in turn.
Public Administration and Performance Management. Public administration
is the implementation of government policy and also an academic discipline that
studies this implementation and prepares civil servants for work in the public
service. Heavily influenced by organizational management as well as policy analysis theory, indicators within public administration appeal with their promise of
reconciling values and high level goals of public service with the instrumental
demands of implementation and measuring results. That is, within a typical public
administration frame, an indicators initiative, theoretically speaking, can be broken

down into four sequential stages of work and pursued in a systematic, efficient
manner. Namely, these stages consist of:

Fig. 1.1 The intersection of
professional fields involved in
the work of community
indicators


1 The History, Status and Future of Community Indicators

7

• Selecting indicators to meet the need to measure progress toward particular
goals;
• Measuring indicators based upon existing or new data;
• Analyzing and reporting on indicators to communicate trends; and
• Designing actions to improve deteriorating trends in communities.
In the field of public administration, indicators find considerable resonance with the
practice of performance measurement, which emerged as an initiative to make more
systematic the evaluation of government and public service work. The use of
indicators within a performance measurement approach to public administration has
not been without its critics, who have pointed out that modelling public and
community work based upon private sector models is not always suitable for
meeting community goals (e.g. Hartley 2010). Different iterations of new frameworks have evolved, as have understandings of how to attribute value to relationships between the observed conditions, the actions taken, and the outcomes that
have transpired.
CIC, with the support of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, identified benefits,
barriers and strategies for better community indicator/performance measure
(CI-PM) integration, highlighting the importance of integration and collaboration to
improve citizen engagement in using information for better community

decision-making. CI-PM integration leads to better assessment of communities’
quality of life and to better engagement of community members and other key
stakeholders in the development and use of community indicators and performance
measures. The work of CI-PM engages both governmental and non-profit organizations, along with community members.
According to one of the leaders of the field of performance measurement, Harry
Hatry (2014) of the Urban Institute, “performance measurement” is a process in
which a governmental or non-governmental public service organization undertakes
regular collection of outcome and/or output data (preferably both) throughout the
year (not only at the end of the year) for its programs and services. One emerging
theory within public administration is that of the “public value”. Moore and
Khagram (2004) coined the term “public value” as the public sector equivalent of
shareholder value in the business sector. The goal is to produce socially desirable
outcomes for a community. Community indicators are one way to track such
progress.
Social Work and Philanthropy. Not far removed from the interests and
objectives of public administration, social work and philanthropy sectors use
indicators as means to better track and measure success in interventions in communities. Indicators work within this sector emphasizes tracking the success of
efforts to improve conditions in poor and marginalized communities, and to learn
from the results of interventions. Compared to the domain of public administration,
this work is less tied to notions of efficiency, and has demonstrated exciting
innovations in recent years related to finding better frameworks for understanding


8

L. Wray et al.

and measuring “collective impact” rather than insisting upon strictly statistical
models of causation (Kania and Kramer 2011). Much work is being conducted
within private as well as community foundations and social organizations working

to redress inequities around the world. The work of the community foundation
Jacksonville Community Council (www.jcci.org) is widely recognized as the
longest running contemporary community indicators initiative.
Community Development. Community development work can be distinguished
from the preceding initiatives by its emphasis on the need for engagement and
empowerment of non-expert community members to diagnose and address their
own problems. Indicators initiatives have proven a valuable tool for numerous
groups, particularly in making a case for the change that they advocate based upon
comparing trends with other communities. There are also intersections between the
work of community development organizations working with indicators and the
public administration strain of indicators work, as these groups too need to prove
the method, efficiency, and impact within their work with public and other grant
funds.
Sustainable Communities and Environmental Justice. Indicators for sustainable communities and environmental justice groups can be thought of as a
special case of community development-based indicators. Emerging from the
internationalization of a sustainable development agenda in the early 1990s, many
community-based groups took up an indicators approach as a means of coming to
terms locally with the meaning and implications of this new frame for thinking
about human progress and environmental protection. Like the work of community
development organizations more broadly, sustainability and environmental justice
indicators efforts have placed a strong emphasis on the process of orienting,
framing, selecting, and presenting the indicators. For the community indicators field
as a whole, this has brought to light the social learning as well as communicative
roles played by indicators, recognizing the limits of the expectation that good data
“speak for themselves.” The environmental justice movement, sometimes more
oriented toward a rights-based argument for action as opposed to one of demonstrating indicators and trends, has found particular utility in indicators work where
indicators can be used to visualize and map stark inequities that go unaddressed in
policy and practice.
Happiness and Wellbeing Studies. US President John F. Kennedy is often
remembered for raising questions about the utility of the single indicator of the

Gross National Product or Gross Domestic Product to refer generally to the progress of society. In addition to being taken up as a mantra within many community
indicators efforts aiming to diversify and qualify arguments about conditions and
trends in local communities, the field of happiness and wellbeing studies has taken
off with a key goal being to find better ways to characterize, communicate and
support human progress.
Famously, the Kingdom of Bhutan prioritized Gross National Happiness as a
national policy priority in the early 1970s, and since this time a growing number of
nations and local communities have invested in thinking harder about how to
promote what makes people happy and well, rather than or in addition to what


1 The History, Status and Future of Community Indicators

9

makes them rich, or safe, or less vulnerable. In this field, key debates flow around
questions of how best to measure subjective concepts such as happiness and
wellbeing, how to compare these measurements, and how to interpret differences.
Data Analytics. Analysis and display of data in ways that effectively communicate
the story behind a trend in data have always been key to good community indicators
work, of any variety. Although community indicators work began well before the use
of internet and mobile technologies had become a daily necessity, the field has been
part of the evolution of better approaches to data visualization and display as informatics and geographic information systems technologies have evolved.
The field of data analytics has emerged as information and internet technologies
have greatly increased the velocity and volume of so-called “big data” available in
cities and communities (IBM 2015). At the same time, this has increased the
opportunities for data entrepreneurs to create new means to collect data, often via
mobile and internet-of-things technologies. With this technological shift, the private
sector has become interested in the indicators field in a major way, with information
technology companies such as IBM, Siemens and Cisco now promoting “smart

cities” and the benefits of living environments that are embedded with sensors and
means to collect and track data at every turn, promising to use this data to create a
more efficient, comfortable life.
The rise of the big data and the smart city concepts may present opportunities
within community indicators, but also present a stark contrast and challenge to the
way in which the community indicators movement has traditionally operated in a
context of data scarcity, not data overabundance. Community indicators projects
have long emphasized the need to collect new and better data to reflect more acutely
upon on-the-ground conditions in overlooked communities and trends. Big data
promoters promise that, with interconnected networks of continuous flows of data
swirling all around our communities, this need for communities to collect their own
data will become obsolete, replaced by the need to acquire the technology and
expertise to mine the abundant digital data for patterns that matter. As such, trends
in big data and data analytics raise many significant questions for the community
indicators movement.
In addition to this basic question about whether the work of community indicators needs to change its overall orientation and approach in order to work with
abundant, fast data, are other questions about the work of ensuring the openness,
transparency, and public nature of data, questions about protection of personal
privacy, and questions about whether the flows of big data do anything, in fact, to
address data scarcity when it comes to the measures that matter to communities.

1.6

New Research in the Field of Community Indicators

Across this diverse field of interests and approaches in community indicators work,
these efforts share a common belief that transparency about specific community
trends and their impacts on overall community conditions will lead to positive

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L. Wray et al.

change that will improve outcomes overall. This belief has been put to the test time
and time again within political battles waged by indicators initiatives, in which the
superior data and the superior argument do not always hold sway. Through a
classical, rational lens of thinking about information and policy change, making a
community and its elected decision-makers aware of negative trends and inequities
should be sufficient to motivate and mobilize action to turn these trends and
inequities around. History tells a different story.
Not unlike the story in other realms of voluntary and community work, efforts in
community indicators have been plagued by the short lifespan of many initiatives.
All too often, the cycle is one of a burst of investment of enthusiasm, dedication,
skill, and resources, a hard slog to establish an initial reputation and reporting
system, some small triumphs of media, community, and perhaps even political
attention, followed by a series of disappointments in efforts to repeat, accelerate, or
institutionalize the work, and ultimately by the decline or disappearance of the
initiative. From a capacity-building, social capital and social learning approach, this
cycle is not a condemnation of community indicators work, because it serves to
launch new careers, political and justice agendas and plant new ideas in community
—this is seeding work. From a perspective of institutional change and the development of better habits around the use of data in decision making and community
action, this is an unfortunate state of affairs, holding community indicators efforts
back from attaining their most significant impacts through a lack of time to measure
and argue for the needs that arise from observed trends over time.
Different perspectives exist on the reasons for this cycle, and how it might be
broken to produce more stability in the community indicators field. In his chapter in
this book, Barrington-Leigh (2017) takes a longitudinal view of community indicators initiatives since the 1970s, and asks what factors may have played the biggest
role in determining the resilience of those that have survived to date. His message is
one of caution about rushing to generate indices from key indicators and data,

because it is the unaggregated and subjectively-oriented indicators initiatives that
seem to have out-survived composite indicators work. Grounded within the field of
happiness and wellbeing studies, Barrington-Leigh makes a case for subjective
measures of life satisfaction, drawing from new understandings of how collective
well-being in community can be derived from individual survey responses to
questions about individual life satisfaction.
Latching on to the work within the realms of philanthropy and social work, as
well as the community development realm of indicators work, a more realistic story
about how better information can guide better decisions involves the recognition
that additional phases of work are needed to mobilize action. Momentum is
growing around the notion that the most effective action is collective—that is, based
upon partnerships of different kinds of organizations that agree to join forces in a
targeted way around a particular trend, or the need for more information in
decision-making more broadly (Kania and Kramer 2011).


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The account that Ridzi (2017) provides in his chapter, Community Indicators
and the Collective Goods Criterion for Impact, is an account of the power of
collective thinking and action. He argues that, although it would be impossible to
prove that the community indicators project CNY.vitals itself is the cause of seven
years of positive change in the four-year high school graduation rate in Syracuse,
New York, the work within this indicators project helped to develop a “measurement mentality” which in and of itself is a collective good in favor of positive
change in this community. Drawing the notion of the collective good criterion from
the social movement literature, Ridzi argues that the positioning of the community
indicator project CNY.vitals in the middle of many social initiatives, with the ability
to contribute something to diverse agendas, meant that this project has more power

to offer community change agents, in all their diversity, than if it had been the kind
of specific, targeted, structured policy change initiative to which impact is typically
attributed. This is a story of a community indicator initiative that worked effectively
to encourage collaboration and movement-building around an inclusive ideal of
desired change as it opened the black box of measures of social progress in the
community and how these measures can be leveraged for action in the longer term.
Helmstetter et al. (2017), working on the community indicators initiative
Minnesota Compass, provide an account of what it has meant for their work in
community indicators to initiate and maintain partnerships. They offer practical
reflections on what they have seen to be key to making partnerships work in this
field, so that their efforts maintain their focus and build impact as they stay involved
with the work of attempting to “move the needle” on the dashboard in the direction
of progress. This case from the philanthropic sector in Minnesota is followed by
another case for partnership formation from Northeast Ohio, provided by Emily
Garr Pacetti, working within the community and economic development sector.
Pacetti’s (2017) chapter, Aligning Local and Regional Data to Achieve a More
Inclusive Economy: A Northeast Ohio Model, focuses on the importance of laying
out the common substantive basis for partnership to align the economic development priorities of different interested groups working in Northeast Ohio, in the
metropolitan Cleveland area. This partnership-based approach found its success
through the convening of partners across sectors and geographies to build a common understanding of competitive economic development that can benefit the
region and that “matters to metros”.
An important claim by the author is that the pursuit of racial inclusion and
income equality can enhance metropolitan regional economic growth. She draws
upon a five-part definition of an inclusive economy, along with evidence that shows
how reducing economic disparities can benefit job growth, while simply increasing
per capita income may not. Northeast Ohio took these two elements to produce the
notion that to sustain growth, communities must invest in opportunities for residents that have often been left behind.


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Holden’s (2017) chapter, Getting to Groundbreaking But Not Build Out, provides
a cautionary tale of partnerships in creating new community indicators projects
around housing development that can break down as political gaps are revealed
between the partners. While this new community indicators initiative showed a great
deal of promise in its initial years of work toward a partnership-based approach to
information sharing and reporting related to the creation of new housing in
metropolitan Vancouver, Canada, ultimately the shared model of control over the
outcomes and messaging, in the context of a yawning political divide amongst the
partners, led to breakdown. This chapter offers lessons about what every community
indicator practitioner knows: that data may present itself as “raw” and politically
neutral, but instead it is always “cooked.” Community indicators work treads on
politically disruptive ground, to the extent that the initiatives represent new groups,
partnerships and coalitions seeking to control and create messages from data that
advance policy agendas which threaten the status quo.
Part 2 of the book offers a series of four case studies of community indicators
projects that are all, in their diverse contexts, seeking to reveal and rectify disparities and injustices. The papers address environmental justice, economic disparities, veterans’ needs, gender equity for women and girls, and the potential of a
systemic model to determine policy action priorities.
In the first article by Gunn et al. (2017) entitled: Environmental Justice in Australia:
Measuring the relationship between industrial odor exposure and community disadvantage, new ground was covered in metropolitan Melbourne, Australia by examining
the spatial correlation between odor complaints, polluting facilities and areas of
socio-economic disadvantage. The research sets out to discover the extent of odor
exposure from facilities and to help identify if communities affected by odor have
different socioeconomic characteristics. The potential benefits are improved pollution
mitigation strategies and better understanding of needed separation distances between
industrial and residential areas particularly in the context of growing metropolitan
areas, that may be increasing the proximity of mixed land uses.
Measurement of odor impact and of socioeconomic status showed indeed that a

disproportionate number of vulnerable community members were affected across
the region. Residents affected by odor impacts were near polluting facilities located
in areas of greater socioeconomic disadvantage with low incomes and poor English
language proficiency. The suggestion was made to use smaller, more granular
geographic measurement areas to avoid averaging out impacts over larger geographic areas. The authors suggest that the findings of the study be used to facilitate
dialogue among policy makers, researchers and communities to inform land use
planning and policy. The findings should be used to avoid encroachment between
residential areas, new developments and industrial zones going forward.
In the next chapter by Green and Espino (2017) entitled: Addressing Disparities
and Improving the System of Care for Veterans through the Community
Assessment Process, the authors describe a San Mateo County veterans’ needs
assessment as part of a strategy to end homelessness among veterans in that county.
Green and Espino start with the chilling statistic that veterans represent 7% of the
overall population but 11% of those experiencing homelessness.


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The authors cite the power of community indicator projects to build on community level data to spur regional partnerships to serve all veterans and to move
from a reactive crisis response system to a more proactive system to produce
wellbeing. They describe the use of a five step community assessment process to
address the challenges of engaging in a veterans’ indicator project to bring about
social change from the identification of veterans, to developing a set of indicators,
building relationships among programs and agencies, improving data systems and
outcomes for veterans and sharing findings and suggestions for improving the
service delivery system. The authors describe a community veterans summit and
formation of a veterans’ commission relating to the community indicators project
that built on the awareness of the need to develop a more coordinated system to

serve veterans.
Next, in the chapter by Lee and Deviney (2017) entitled: Economic Issues for
Women in Texas, the authors present a variety of important trends through disaggregation of data in community indicators through gender as an example of a key
factors or lens with which to address community indicators. The authors set out to
encourage others to learn more about the economic challenges and opportunities
faced by women and girls in Texas. The hope is to increase the economic security
of women by sharing information with community leaders, elected and appointed
officials, non-profit organizations, businesses and foundations. The article gives
strength to the principle that is often makes sense to disaggregate data into more
refined slices to gain a clearer and more nuanced view of an issue. This is clearly
true in the case of the gender lens for women and girls as presented for the state of
Texas.
Women and girls in Texas are presented as a young, diverse and growing
population. Thirty-seven percent of women and girls are Hispanic or Latina, for
example. Women are 1.2 times as likely to be in poverty as a man. Sixty-seven
percent of two parent households have both parents working out of the home.
Average wages for women are about one quarter less than men. Women are making
gains in post-secondary education but economic barriers remain to increasing
higher education rates. Child care costs and lack of pre-kindergarten programs are
important challenges. Issues of health insurance access and housing affordability
also negatively impact women.
By disaggregating data across a number of areas, the paper shows the challenges
faced by women and girls and offers support for addressing the critical need to
invest in building blocks for economic security for women and girls to the betterment of the state of Texas as a whole.
Finally, King (2017) lays out the framework followed in Houston to develop a
comprehensive sustainability indicators program that relies on the power of
objective data over that of subjective understandings and preferences. The systematic model pursued in the case of the Houston project is explained, demonstrating the value of geographic information systems and statistical principal


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components analysis to define clusters of indicator relationships that in turn can
help inform strategic priority setting for sustainable development investment with
impact. This last case brings the volume full circle back to a similar sense of what
community indicators projects are for to that of Barrington-Leigh (2017). That is,
that these measurement systems ought to be designed to provide information that
will empower others to aggregate it in different ways and make value judgments to
inform priorities and actions, across the community and over the long term. Even
across the diversity of approaches to community indicators today, widespread
agreement exists that this provision of clear, valuable, timely information to nonexpert audiences is key to the success of the indicator movement. Where significant
difference continues to exist is on the question of what else community indicators
projects need to do to gain and maintain an audience and institutional presence,
remain relevant as other sources of information proliferate, and as conditions may
continue to worsen despite the most valiant efforts to bring injustices, deterioration,
and failed policy outcomes to light.
As an aggregate, these chapters reveal community indicator projects to be relevant, dynamic and adaptive. Whether applied to a single issue or the wellbeing of a
whole community, indicators have the power to inform, convene, unite, and ultimately improve community conditions. The field of community indicators has
undergone a rapid evolution in only a few decades, and this evolution is ongoing.
Across the field we continue to see a search for balance between the role of
subjective well-being and more objective indicators of community well-being, and
between more collaborative and values-based and more expert-led approaches.
Community indicators projects today operate within a need to amplify the voice of
disadvantaged communities, seriously explore the increasing use of information
technology, and a continuing struggle to produce positive community change and to
sustain these efforts over time.

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Author Biographies
Lyle Wray, Ph.D. serves as Executive Director of the Capitol Region Council of Governments
based in Hartford, Connecticut that serves one million residents. He has been involved in
community indicator projects in California and Connecticut most recently with the www.
metrohartfordprogresspoints.org project. He serves as Vice-President of the Community Indicator
Consortium. His published work has focused on citizen engagement in community performance
measurement projects. He earned a BA, MA and Ph.D. in Psychology from the University of
Manitoba, Winnipeg, Canada.
Chantal Stevens is the Executive Director of the Community
Indicators Consortium, an open learning network and global
community of practice among persons interested or engaged in
the field of indicators development and application. Her interests
and expertise in sustainability, community indicators, public
engagement and performance management were honed over a
25-year career as the Executive Director of Sustainable Seattle, a
pioneer in the field of community-generated indicators, and
People for Salmon, a state-wide public engagement initiative, as
well as Performance Management Analyst and Legislative
Auditor with King County, Environmental Division Manager
with the Muckleshoot Indian Tribe, and several terms on the

Issaquah Planning Commission and many position and diverse
boards or commissions. She holds a Master’s Degree in Marine
Affairs from the University of Washington.
Meg Holden, Ph.D. is a social scientist whose research investigates the promises and results of sustainability planning in cities
around the world. She is an Associate Professor of urban studies
and geography at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver,
Canada. Meg served as a board member of the Community
Indicators Consortium from 2011 to 2016 and she currently
serves as editorial board member of the journal Applied Research
in Quality of Life as well as the Springer book series on
Community Quality of Life and Wellbeing. Meg is the author of
Pragmatic Justifications for the Sustainable City: Acting in the
common place (Routledge, 2017). Meg obtained the Ph.D. in
Public and Urban Policy from the New School for Social
Research.